Tish Boyle's caramel apple tart

I usually try to avoid posting other people's recipes straight since I think that there's not much point to it - why not just refer readers to the original recipe? Well, I'm going to do exactly that, for this caramel apple tart by Tish Boyle was so unbelievably delicious that I want to tell the whole world about it! I fell in love with caramelised fruits again after making tarte tatin a couple of times in the past few weeks, and I suddenly remembered that Tish has a recipe for a caramel apple tart on her blog. I tried making one and it was one of the nicest tarts I've ever had the fortune to have. The creamy caramel custard envelops the apples and almost acts as a sauce to the apples. While a tarte tatin needs some sort of cream to soften its edge, this tart needs no accompaniment and is utterly delicious on its own. Think of it as a mellower, self-saucing version of tarte tatin.

I couldn't resist tweaking the recipe slightly: I added an extra apple and skipped the cinnamon. I also macerated the apples in sugar before reducing the syrup drawn from the apples to a caramel before proceeding in similar fashion as as Tish had it. I prefer serving it cold, too.

Pear Tarte Tatin

In search of the perfect tarte tatin

I love tarts in general - there's something about that combination of the soft, creamy filling and the crisp tart shell that is utterly irresistible. One of the most famous of tarts, of course, is tarte tatin, the upside-down apple tart that was created by accident at the Hotel Tatin in Lamotte-Beuvron by Stéphanie and Caroline Tatin. Unlike most tarts, you caramelise the fruits (usually apples) first and leave them at the bottom of the pan. You then put the pastry on top of the fruits and bake it like that in the oven. You take the tart out and invert it to serve so that it's fruits up, pastry down.

This method of preparation is meant to avoid a soggy pastry because the pastry is placed on top of rather than beneath the fruits. After years of continuous frustration, whether at home or at restaurant, I am convinced that it is a myth. The baking process extracts so much juice from the fruits that, more often than not, the juice drowns the hard-won pastry into a sad, soggy mess when you invert the tart, and all your naive hopes for a crisp tart are ruthlessly crushed. Apples tend to be more forgiving, but with a juicy fruit like pears or peaches, you're almost guaranteed that your finished tart will be swamped with fruit juices. It's in moments like this that I curse myself for bothering to put a pastry crust there in the first place. Incidentally, I used to have two friends in London who, believe or not, preferred a swamped, soggy pastry (and croissants) to a dry, crisp one. I am gratified to know that one of them has repented and changed his mind since then.

Despite these pitfalls, I was convinced that there must be ways one could undertake to preserve the glory of a tarte tatin with beautifully caramelised fruits and divinely crisp pastry. Water is the sworn enemy of a proper tarte tatin, I have tried various ways to eliminate it as far as I can. Here's how I go about it.

Beautifully fragrant pears from Xinjiang, China (庫爾勒香梨) that have a crunchy texture perfect for baking, but they're also extremely juicy. If you use a 'normal' pear, make sure they're under-ripe.

Thanksgiving 2012

It's holiday time! I went to two friends' houses for thanksgiving this year. It was a busy schedule for a holiday, but one that's filled with laughter, joy and lots and lots of food. I'm thankful that I didn't have to do any savoury cooking and could just show up and be fed - how much better could it get?

Wednesday 21nd November

Arrived at Mark and Jaewon's house in Frankfort, Kentucky with Tim, Hitomi, Assaf, Noa and their cute little baby Mickey.

Mark, the victim of our thanksgiving dinner. He'll be slaving in the next two days.

Assaf and his 18-month-old baby Mickey.

Tim and Hitomi.

We just pottered about while everyone else was busy!

Strawberry cream tart

Kitchen disaster (and how to get on with life)

Chaos

In many creation myths throughout the world, the apparent order of the universe emerged out of a primeval chaos. In Greek mythology, Chaos was personified as the first of the primordial deities and the god of the air. In fact, primal Chaos was sometimes said to be the true foundation of reality (particularly by Ionian philosophers such as Heraclitus). Cooks often have to do just the same: turning culinary chaos into something edible and tasty with a sensible form. With baking there is much less room for for this transformation: everything has to be 'right' to start with if you want your batter to turn into a cake rather than a cookie. Sometimes, however, you're left with no choice but to summon all your faculties to save your failed baking attempts.

Yesterday I had to prepare dessert for a last-minute dinner the next day with a friend who was leaving town soon. I had a carton of strawberries sitting in the fridge, so I thought it's good timing to make a strawberry dessert. I started preparing the dessert last night, thinking that I would have plenty of time in case something didn't quite work out. As it happened, one disaster followed another and it ended up with something very different from what I had set out to make. Thankfully, my rescue efforts weren't in vain it and I was informed that the end-result was edible!

Originally, I wanted to serve berries with a sabayon and caramelise it with a blowtorch. It looks stunning and doesn't require much work. A sabayon is an egg foam made with egg yolks and a sweet wine like Marsala. I didn't have sweet wine any on hand, so I thought that I could substitute with Chinese rose wine, thinking that rose would complement strawberries very well - I often make strawberry tarts with a pastry cream flavoured with this wine and it works beautifully. Well, this particular rose wine I had wasn't of very good quality to start with, and maybe there's just too much of it compared to its subtle presence in a pastry cream... The sabayon tasted bitter, confused and... cheap. I dumped the whole batch.

Not-so-tangy lemon tart

'Lemon lovers are a special breed. They are shamelessly devoted to their favourite flavour, and they like it to be assertive and bold.' So wrote Tish Boyle, author of the Cake Book and one of my favourite American recipe writers. Since childhood, I've always been aversive to anything sour. Sure, I find vinegar and lemon juice essential in highlighting the flavours in a dish, but among the 'five flavours' sourness is the one that I've always been apprehensive about. I'm defensively sceptical whenever people tell me that an orange is sweet because I would always find it incredibly sour when I taste it myself - it's a topic which I've decided that I can trust no-one about. For the same reason I try to avoid tomatoes, and all kinds of berries. So I'm sorry, I don't belong to the breed.

That said, I do love the bright, zingy flavour of lemon. Thankfully, you can get plenty of citrus flavour from the skin and be light-handed with how much lemon juice you use. Now a true lemon-lover would argue that sourness is as essential a part of lemony-ness as the zesty fragrance, but I just can't. I shiver when I eat anything moderately tangy - I blame it on my genetics. Perhaps I should be equally magnanimous when I hear people complain that something is 'too chocolatey'.